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Friday, April 25, 2008

Dreaming of warmth and picnics...

Even though they are calling for an inch of snow overnight (enough already!), I know, or at least hope, warm weather that will last for more than a day is right around the corner. I can't wait for the first time that we can pack up a little basket, head out to one of the many local parks to overdose on fresh air and enjoy a picnic!

Once we prepare a recipe, it is filed in a number of ways, depending on what it was and what we thought of it. Tonight's dinner, Pacific Rim Wraps with Creamy Citrus Ginger Dressing, will definitely be heading into a file that is starting to fill up with picnic-worthy recipes.

With a couple interesting ingredients, the dressing for these wraps was an intriguing mixture of evaporated milk, fresh lemon juice, canola oil, granulated sugar, ginger, along with the obligatory salt and fresh ground black pepper. For ease of mixing, the ingredients are simply thrown into a small resealable container (we used a smaller canning jar) and shaken until well combined - a perfect job if you happen to have little helpers around! I thought the dressing would have ended up a bit too sweet for our tastes, so I only used half of the sugar - but once I tasted it, I added the other half. It looked like a bit much at first, however, with the pungency from the ginger and sharp lemon juice, it is needed to maintain a balance.

For the salad inside of the wraps, we first shredded up a bunch of crisp romaine lettuce and a few chicken breasts that we poached. To those, we added crunchy matchstick-cut carrots, crunchy sugar snap peas, chewy dried cranberries and a small handful of toasted slivered almonds. If you are going to serve all of this at once, go ahead and add the required amount of dressing and continue on. However, it's not like we were going to eat this all by ourselves, so I divided the dry salad mixture between a few containers and placed them in the refrigerator. This way, I can keep the dressing separate and won't have a soggy mess of leftovers to work with when we have the rest for lunch tomorrow! We served this by adding the dressed salad mixture to our favorite tortillas (we used the Chipotle Chile and Peppers flavored version), rolled them up and sliced them in half. With a myriad of textures, these appetizing wraps, with their unique dressing, were light, quite refreshing and I'm already counting down until we can finish the rest tomorrow afternoon! You could even take these in a different direction and make this bit lighter - how about serving the filling in a halved pita or just grabbing a fork and digging in for a delicious salad without the bread!